Backyard, urban gardens planted to squeeze every penny out of a food budget.

"People's home grocery budget got absolutely shredded and now we've seen just this dramatic increase in the demand for our vegetable seeds. We're selling out," said George Ball, CEO of Burpee Seeds, the largest mail-order seed company in the U.S. "I've never seen anything like it."

Gardening advocates have dubbed the newly planted tracts "recession gardens" and hope to shape the interest into a movement similar to the victory gardens of World War II. Those gardens, modeled after a White House patch planted by Eleanor Roosevelt in 1943, were intended to inspire self- sufficiency, and at their peak supplied 40 percent of the nation's fresh produce, said Roger Doiron, founding director of Kitchen Gardeners International.
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2009/03/16-6